


Christmas in August

by mille_libri



Category: Criminal Minds
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-09-21
Updated: 2015-09-21
Packaged: 2018-04-22 18:07:39
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,512
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4845245
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/mille_libri/pseuds/mille_libri
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Morgan shows up at Garcia's for movie night - to find her in the midst of a late summer Christmas. {Friendship, not a pairing.}</p>
            </blockquote>





	Christmas in August

Garcia looked around the room, making sure everything was ready. Footed pajamas with reindeer and sleigh bells, check. Hot cocoa with marshmallows and gaily decorated sugar cookies by the couch, check. Mini Christmas tree covered with twinkling white lights on the table, check. White Christmas queued up, ready for her to lift the remote and click the button, check. She sighed happily. All day long sitting in her little windowless office in the BAU she’d been looking forward to this, just curling up with one of her favorite movies and indulging herself. The team had wrapped up another case, and after the pictures she’d seen, a little decompression was called for.

She was just finding her comfy spot in the corner of the couch, remote in hand, when her doorbell rang, and she jumped nearly a foot, only relaxing when the familiar, deep, rich voice came through the door.

“Garcia! Hey, baby girl, open up.”

“Derek Morgan, my chocolate dream,” she said, hurrying to the door and unbolting it. “What did I do to deserve this? I must have been a very good girl this year.”

“Aren’t you always?” He was smiling as she opened the door, but his forehead crumpled into a concerned frown as he looked her up and down. “What on earth have you got on?”

“Like ‘em? They’re my favorite most comfy Christmas pjs.”

“Garcia, you know it’s 97 degrees outside … and it’s August. Don’t you?” Morgan appeared genuinely concerned that she might not know. In deference to the heat, he was wearing a black tank top that showed off his beautifully sculpted shoulders, and black cargo shorts.

“Just right for a little Christmas in July. August, then,” she said, grinning at his consternation, “but July sounds better.”

“You are a very strange woman.”

Garcia stepped aside to let him in, closing the door behind him and leaning against it to watch his very fine backside as he walked slowly through the room, looking around him and shaking his head at the evidences of her summer Yuletide celebration. A happy warmth filled her heart, bubbling up to show on her face. She didn’t know what good spirits had conspired to bring this man into her life, but she was grateful to them. “You never said what you came over for.”

He held up the plastic bag in his hand. “Felt like some ice cream, and who better to share some with?” Digging into the bag, he came out with a tub of sinfully rich chocolate fudge brownie, her favorite, from the good ice cream place in his neighborhood.

“My favorite craving … holding my favorite ice cream.” She gave him a saucy wink.

“That’s what I thought you’d say.” Morgan’s face crumpled in a mock frown as he looked around him. “But now I’m thinking I should go back out for some milk and cookies.”

“No, no,” Garcia said hastily. “Ice cream knows no season.”

“All right. Spoons in here?” He moved into her tiny kitchen and started opening drawers. “Ah, there they are.” He grabbed two and came back to her, handing her the carton of ice cream and one of the spoons. He held his up, and they toasted with the spoons, a tiny little clinking sound that made Garcia giggle. Morgan grinned and sat down on her couch, stretching his legs out comfortably and digging into the ice cream.

“Chocolate for you, as well?”

“Caramel fudge. I like a little bit of everything.” He winked at her.

“I’ve heard that about you.” Garcia curled up in the corner of the couch. She took a spoonful of ice cream, savoring the decadent flavor. “Mmm.”

Morgan chuckled. “I like a woman who likes her food.”

“I bet most of the women you date don’t eat much ice cream.”

“Not in front of me, they don’t. When they go home—that’s a different story.”

“Always the profiler. Can’t you let them have their fantasies of health and good habits?”

“I don’t tell them I know what they’re doing. Can’t help reading their signals, though.” He glanced over at her cup of cocoa. “Your marshmallows are melting.”

“Oh, no!” Garcia put down her ice cream, reaching for the cup. She paused with it halfway to her lips. “Worse yet, I haven’t made any cocoa for you.”

As she made her way into the kitchen to put fresh marshmallows in her hot chocolate and start making his, Morgan called after her, “What could you have been thinking, woman?”

“It isn’t as though I knew you were coming, you know.” She poked her head around the corner to look at him. “Not that I’m complaining, but how did you know I didn’t have other plans?” The corner of his mouth turned up, and Garcia sighed. “Fine. How did you know?”

“You took your time packing up, but said no to JJ’s invitation to dinner, which said to me that you had something on tonight but weren’t meeting anyone. So, movie night.” 

“Profilers,” Garcia muttered. She stirred the milk into the thick chocolate in the saucepan. “I thought you weren’t allowed to use those skills on other members of the team.”

“Gotta keep yourself sharp, mama. Besides, reading you isn’t profiling.”

“Hey!”

Morgan chuckled at her indignation. “Baby girl, you wear your heart on your sleeve. It doesn’t take a profiler to see exactly who you are, or to love you for it. Our team needs you for a lot more than your magic dancing fingers.”

Garcia could feel her cheeks pinkening under his praise. He always knew just what she needed to hear, and after a week’s worth of sitting helpless while her whole team, her family, was out there risking their lives, it was important to her to know that she contributed to the team’s overall well-being.

The chocolate was simmering, and she whisked it for a minute before pouring it into a thick mug with a dancing marshmallow painted on its side. She added real marshmallows and carried the cup back to Morgan. “You’re quite the sweet-talker, Derek Morgan.”

“Come sit down,” he said, patting the couch cushions. “If we’re going to get through this movie, we’d better get started. What are we watching, anyway?”

“ _White Christmas_. You know,” she said at his blank expression. “Bing Crosby, Rosemary Clooney? Come on, you have to have seen this, if only on TV while you were flipping channels.”

“There was no channel-surfing at my house,” he said. “My momma thought if you had time to flip through channels looking for something to watch, you had time to scrub the bathroom.”

“If I didn’t happen to know what a warm and loving woman your mother was, I’d pity you for your deprived childhood.” Garcia smiled, curling her legs up under her and taking a sip of her reheated cocoa. “How is your mother?”

“She’s good. She keeps herself busy—never enough time in the day.” Morgan glanced down at his tub of ice cream, which was already half gone. “She asks about you, sometimes. I’m not sure she really gets the way things are with us.”

“Not many people do. Kevin, for one.” There had been many, many arguments and jealous scenes between them, ugly accusations that she was cheating on him with Morgan. Garcia had hotly denied it, but there was a sense in which Kevin wasn’t wrong—she could share things with Derek that she’d never shared with anyone else, and be totally and completely herself around him in a way she couldn’t with most people. He understood her, from her purple polka dot painted toenails to her crazy Cindy Brady pigtails, and everything in between.

“I thought he’d gotten used to it.”

“He says so, but I think he’s putting on a good face.” It worried her; she loved Kevin and hated having something come between them, but Derek was family and more. She could never alter that, even if she’d wanted to.

Morgan put a hand on her arm. “Stop worrying. If he’s willing to say he’s fine with it, then he’ll come around to being fine with it. Trust me. He’s a good guy.”

“I know. I just … don’t like hurting him, and I don’t like that he’s threatened by something so very not threatening.”

“I get you, baby girl, but I think you worry too much. If Kevin has a real problem with you and me that he can’t overcome, he’ll tell you. You need to trust that, and stop seeing secrets where there aren’t any.”

Garcia put her cocoa down. “I know you’re right.”

“Of course you do.” He grinned, then got up from the couch, taking the lid to his tub of ice cream off the table and capping it off. “Much more of this and you’ll have to roll me out of here.”

“Morgan-rolling? It could be a new sport.” She winked at him saucily. “Or from what I hear, it already is.”

He grinned, a little shyly, still a kid proud of his conquests sometimes. “What can I say?”

“Oh, you needn’t say anything. I understand the call of the chocolate, lover-boy.”

“You think we need popcorn?” he called, his head in her open refrigerator door.

“I thought you were full from ice cream.”

“I am. Now I need somethin’ salty to go along with the sweet.”

“At this rate,” Garcia called, “we’ll never get to the movie.”

“Girl, you know we never watch the movie anyway. You can’t go for five minutes without talking, unless you’re in front of a computer. I bet you even talk to yourself when no one else is home.”

She smiled. “How well you know me, my dark prince.”

“So what do you talk to yourself about, anyway?” He came back, popcornless for the moment, and settled on the couch next to her.

“What do you talk to yourself about?”

“Who says I do?”

“Everyone talks to themselves.” Garcia shrugged, digging her spoon into the ice cream to dislodge a fudgy chunk of brownie.

“Not as much as you think.”

“Come on, of course they do! Who else would understand?”

“Hotch does not talk to himself.”

Garcia narrowed her eyes. “No, probably not. I’ll give you that one. But Rossi? He has chats with himself in the mirror every morning, you can bet on it. And Reid? He has to talk to himself—who else can keep up with him?”

“You have a point there, baby girl.”

“So … what do you talk to yourself about?”

Morgan looked away, the smile fading from his face and his eyes going off to that private, dark room he kept closed off from everyone. He looked his most beautiful that way, when he was thoughtful and serious and you could almost, but not quite, see what he was thinking. Sometimes she wished more people could see him this way … but she didn’t, either, because the last thing she wanted to see was Derek vulnerable and hurt by some woman who didn’t deserve him. (Did any of them? Doubtful, in Garcia’s most humble opinion.)

“Derek?” she asked gently, when it seemed as though he wouldn’t answer.

“Keeping my head in the game,” he said. “Holding my temper.” Morgan nodded slowly, a little smile playing at the corners of his mouth. “We have a lot of talks about that, myself and I.”

Much-needed talks, Garcia imagined. Morgan kept himself on a tight leash, but there was a lot of anger compacted into those well-defined muscles. No doubt the exercise was a way to burn off some of the excess that built up in his job. She hoped she was another way, that their friendship and the time they spent together made it easier for him to let go of some of that anger and let in the lighter emotions he had such a harder time admitting into his psyche.

“You’re absolutely right, baby girl,” he said softly.

“About what?” she asked, pretty sure she hadn’t been speaking those thoughts out loud.

“About what you bring to my life. Name me one other crazy woman who would be in the middle of Christmas in July when I knocked on her door.”

“August,” Garcia corrected automatically.

“Right. And who would be the voice of the real world when I call in the middle of a case—not even the real world, but some bright, sunny version of it where you live and which I can see but can so rarely get to. My world has never been like that, until I met you.”

“Sing it,” she said, nudging him.

He raised his eyebrows, and Garcia giggled.

“If I’m your sunshine … your only sunshine … you might as well go all the way and sing it to me.”

“Woman, you are out of your mind if you think I’m going to sing.”

“Come on, lover, let that sweet chocolate voice pour all over me.” She closed her eyes as if she could feel the warmth of it flowing over her skin, and Morgan chuckled.

“Not gonna happen.”

“Tease.”

“Come here, baby girl.” He held out an arm, and Garcia tucked herself in next to him, her head on his shoulder. “So if you’re my sunshine, and you remind me of all the good things in the world when I’m in the darkest places, what do I bring to you?”

She twisted around to frown at him. “Don’t you know?”

Morgan shook his head.

Garcia smiled, nudging his rock-hard shoulder with the side of her head. “This.”

“Really, you’re going for the ‘muscular arms’ right now?” He raised his eyebrows.

“No. I mean, yes, but not just that. You’re here, Derek. You’re always here, when I need you—even when I don’t know what I need. You show up out of the blue and remind me that I’m not alone; that there are people out there I can count on, no matter what. You’re my rock.” She closed her eyes, trying not to think of all the times she’d almost lost him. “Even if you do take crazy, ridiculous chances with your incredibly precious life.”

“Hey.” He pressed his head against hers for just a moment. “I’m not going anywhere, Penelope. I promise.”

Garcia blinked away tears. “Good. Because if you did, I’d have to come after you.”

“I believe you would.”

“Oh, I would. And you would be very, very sorry, Derek Morgan.” She smiled at him, and he gave a mock shiver.

“Yes, ma’am.” He leaned back against the couch, his arm warm and firm around her, surveying the room. “You know, you may be the strangest person I’ve ever met.”

“’May be’?” Garcia echoed. “I think I’ll have to try harder.”

“Can you?”

“Oh, most assuredly.”

“I look forward to it.”

They were quiet for a moment, resting comfortably against one another. Morgan reached for the remote, clicking on the movie, and the credits began to roll. Garcia snuggled in closer, sighing in bliss. Watching a beloved movie with her most beloved Morgan—Santa had already outdone himself this year, and it was only August.


End file.
